‘Can we have a look at the new lorries?’ O’Connor asked, his tone light. Barratt had no idea what he was thinking, this wasn’t part of their plan and he didn’t see what they might gain. Was the DS simply curious about haulage vehicles or had he spotted something that Barratt had missed?
Sims looked as puzzled as Barratt felt. ‘What? Why?’
O’Connor shrugged and smiled. ‘No reason really. Just curious. We had a look around last time we were here, but all the vehicles were locked. It might give us an insight into the type of operation you’ve introduced.’
Sims stood up, fists clenched by his sides, a muscle in his jaw flexing. ‘No. You have no right to come here accusing me of all sorts. I’ve just lost my friend and mentor and you lot want to harass me into confessing to something I didn’t do. For the last time, I didn’t kill Peter and Eleanor Houghton and I’ve no idea who did. And if you want to poke around my yard get a bloody warrant. This conversation is over.’
O’Connor leapt to his feet and Sims stepped backwards as though expecting a blow but instead the detective leaned forwards and tilted his head slightly like a snake preparing to strike. Barratt tensed – his colleague was known for his short fuse – but was surprised when O’Connor simply whispered, ‘You’re right.’
Sims’s eyebrows flew up in surprise, but Barratt knew O’Connor well. There was more to come.
‘We should get a warrant,’ O’Connor continued. ‘I like to do things by the book.’
He winked at the man and turned to Barratt. ‘Come on, Matt. Let’s leave Mr Sims in peace. For now.’
1983
Anita’s going to Spain for her holidays. It’s not fair. We never go anywhere good like that. Dad’s always too busy for holidays, so he says, so Mum gets the final say and she always brings me here. It’s better in the summer. There are more children – some are my age, but a lot are much younger – so there’s usually somebody to play with. And there’s Taz. She’s an adult but she likes to talk to the kids; she makes up really detailed stories, straight out of her head, and tells us rude jokes when the mums aren’t listening. She’s given me a nickname – Titch – it’s because I’m only little, I think. She gives everybody nicknames. Our group is ‘The Yorkies’ because most of the women come from different parts of Yorkshire. Two live quite close to us but some of the others are from Leeds and there are a lot from Sheffield. There are other groups – a lot of the women are from Wales but I don’t know if they have a nickname.
Taz is the only one who’s explained to me why we’re here and why it’s important. When I ask Mum, she just says I wouldn’t understand and to stand up straight when the policemen talk to me. But I do understand – thanks to Taz. She says that there are dangerous missiles behind the wire but they’re not ours, not British. Our government – the men and women who run the country – have let the American army keep them here. They’re very special and could blow up the whole world but other countries might want to attack us to get them for themselves.
These weapons are the most dangerous in the whole world and, if the Americans use them, there won’t even be much of a world left, according to Taz. She says they were used in World War II and thousands of people died, and people are still dying because they’ve got some kind of poison in them.
The women don’t want these missiles in England – they don’t want these weapons anywhere on Earth because they’re so scary – so they’ve said they’ll stay here and make life difficult for the soldiers and the policemen until the Americans take the weapons away. I understand it all a lot better now, but I don’t really see how we’re going to make a difference. There are probably more than a thousand women here, but the people in government are bigger and stronger – and they’re mostly men – and the Americans are stronger still.
Taz says it’s not about strength though. She says it’s about morality and when people see we’re in the right they’ll support us and get the weapons sent somewhere else. If that happens, will there be other camps, other women? Will it just carry on until there’s nowhere else to put them and so they have to be destroyed? And how do you destroy bombs? You can’t blow them up. That’s the bit I find most confusing even when Taz explains it.
The other thing she says a lot is that there might not be a world left for me to grow up in. I hate it when she talks about that – it makes me feel funny in my tummy and I want to cry. There are big forests that help to keep us alive by making sure we can breathe but men are cutting them down so they can use the wood and then the land is left for houses or to feed cows. I don’t really understand the thing with the cows – I like cows. Taz goes on a lot about pollution as well – pollution makes the rivers and the air dirty and it’s not good for us. She says we’re poisoning the planet and nobody cares. That can’t be right though. Why would people deliberately poison the air that they breathe and the water that they drink? It doesn’t make sense.
I like it better when Taz tells us stories. They’re usually about girls who make the world better by saving animals or planting trees, stuff like that. It’s always girls. She says that women are stronger than they know and that there’s something called ‘empowerment’, but I don’t know what that is yet.
Today we did something different – a new type of protest. A protest is a way of saying that you think something is wrong – Taz taught me that – but this protest didn’t have any words. Lots of the women spread out, trying to surround the whole fence even though it’s miles, and held mirrors up. If somebody had seen it from an aeroplane it would have looked like a massive eye, all lit up with the base as the pupil. I didn’t understand what they were doing until I saw one of the soldiers come up to the fence and look at himself in the mirror. He was smiling at first, friendly, and he even said hello: then he saw the mirror and he changed. It was like there was something in his reflection that scared him or made him angry. Or maybe he saw how much he looked like a dangerous person and he felt like he had to act like his reflection. He swore at us and spat on the ground, but the woman just stood there, holding the mirror like a shield, waiting for him to turn round and leave.
I asked Taz about it later, but I didn’t really understand her explanation. She said something about showing the men what they looked like – holding the mirror up to nature – and then she laughed and lit one of her funny-smelling cigarettes.
The best thing about being here in the summer is that we can stay up until it’s dark and that’s not till ten o’ clock. When we’re all sitting around a fire and the women are talking it feels like a proper holiday and I’m not jealous of Anita and her beach. It’s like camping – sometimes we even roast marshmallows on sticks, but I don’t like them much – they’re too hot and sticky. The women in our group are like a little family. They all look out for each other and stick up for each other. Taz is good at making everybody feel wanted and welcome and she sometimes brings in what she calls ‘stragglers’ – women who’ve just arrived and haven’t worked out where they want to be or who they want to be with.
Her most recent ‘straggler’, Sarah, is really nice – almost as nice as Taz. I hope she stays with us because most of the other women are old but Sarah’s only a bit older than Taz. She doesn’t treat me like a little kid and she answers all my questions when there’s something I don’t understand.
I’ve noticed that Mum’s different here in the summer. She’s more friendly with the others and she’s not as strict with me. She talks about the future and how she wants a better world for me to grow up in. She believes in the same things as Taz, she just doesn’t explain them as well. She knows about the missiles and the forests and the cows. Sometimes, when she’s had some of Taz’s home-made wine she gets a bit teary and tells me that she can’t do it all – that it’s up to me and my generation to make a change. We have to be the ones who make the men understand how to look after the planet and the people. I don’t know how she expects me to do that yet, but she keeps trying to explain. I like Mum much better here than at home.
18
Sylvia Kerr opened the front door as soon as Kate and Hollis stepped out of the car. She’d either heard the crunch of tyres on gravel or, as Kate suspected, been watching for them to pull onto the driveway. The look the woman gave the two detectives was ambiguous, hard to read – there was relief there but something else, a darker emotion concealed in her eyes and the set of her lips. As she got closer Kate could read her expression more closely. Sylvia Kerr was furious.
‘I can’t pretend I’m happy to see you again,’ Kerr snapped as she led them down the hallway of her home to the living room at the back. ‘I don’t want to have this conversation, but I need to find out the truth about what happened to Liv and you two are my best chance of doing that.’
Not exactly a vote of confidence, Kate thought, taking the seat she was directed to with a casual flick of Sylvia’s hand.
‘I need to get this off my chest,’ Kerr said, sitting opposite Hollis, her back to the window, face obscured by shadows. ‘If I don’t, I’m afraid it will eat away at me and sully my memories of Liv.’ The woman sighed and shifted slightly in her seat, tucking a stray strand of grey hair behind her ear. ‘This isn’t easy to admit and I’m so angry at her for putting me in this position, but I think Liv may have been seeing somebody else.’
‘What makes you think that?’ Kate asked. Having been married to somebody who treated infidelity like a game, she had some idea of how Sylvia might be feeling, but she’d only been married to Garry for fifteen years; this couple had been together for decades.
Kerr shook her head as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was about to say. ‘She’d changed. I thought it was retirement, that she was bored and struggling to adapt to not working. We laughed about her having so much time on her hands and I got her to start a few projects in the garden that she’d been promising to do for years but she seemed to get more distant the more time we spent together, if that makes sense?’
Kate nodded sympathetically. Nick had accused her of the same thing from time to time when she’d been preoccupied with a case – mental distance despite their physical proximity. It was probably part of all relationships, but she knew that the partners of police officers often complained about not being allowed into the lives of their significant others. If it had followed her into retirement, the distance did suggest that Liv had something else going on in her life.
‘A few weeks before she died,’ Sylvia went on, ‘Liv told me that she’d heard from an old friend and that she was going to meet them for coffee. She was vague when I asked where she knew this person from, but I got the sense that it was a woman. She came back from that meeting even more preoccupied and that’s when the early-morning walks started.’
‘In the Peak District, where she was found?’ Kate asked.
‘That’s where she said she was going. She was having trouble sleeping so sometimes she’d get up early and go out.’
‘What was her state of mind when she came back?’ Kate asked.
‘Odd. Distracted. But then she’d seem to give herself a shake and throw herself into whatever we’d got planned for the day.’
‘Did you ask her about these early-morning walks? Whether she’d seen anybody, met anybody?’
Sylvia smiled sadly. ‘Of course, but when she said no what was I supposed to do? Ask her a lot of follow-up questions? Give her a multiple-choice quiz?’
The woman stood up and turned to the window, shoulders hunched, fists clenched. Kate glanced at Hollis who gave her a tiny shrug. There was little they could do except wait and allow Sylvia to tell the story in her own time.
‘I’m not a suspicious person, especially where Liv’s concerned.’ Sylvia still had her back to them. ‘We’d been together a long time and neither of us had been the perfect partner one hundred per cent of the time – who can be? But we trusted each other. If I messed up, I knew I could tell Liv and we could work through it. If she had been seeing somebody else, I would like to think she could have told me. Instead, she forced me to doubt her and to start looking for clues, slip-ups, inconsistencies. Do you know what happens when you start looking for things like that?’
She turned suddenly, glaring at Kate.
‘You find them.’
Kate felt her cheeks flush. She remembered all too well the furtive checking of Garry’s pockets, ringing him when he said he was out with friends to see if she could hear pub noise in the background and, much worse, the temptation to use ANPR cameras and CCTV to track his whereabouts. Thankfully, she’d realised that her job was worth more than her marriage to a cheat and she had never crossed that line, but the feelings of embarrassment and impotence remained not too far beneath the surface. She caught Sylvia’s knowing look and hoped that Hollis had the good sense to keep quiet. He didn’t know much about her past and she didn’t want him to ask.
‘I was worried that I was turning into a stereotype. Questioning everything, doubting what I was told, what I saw for myself. And now I hate that I never asked. I never gave Liv the chance to explain herself, to put things right between us.’
Sylvia sat back down, leaning forward with her head in her hands. ‘I never gave her the chance,’ she said quietly. ‘And then you two turned up and made me doubt the way she’d died. What if she had been seeing somebody and they’d killed her? What if this person from her past was somebody who’d borne a grudge for years and had finally paid her back for something? A criminal she arrested? A family member who blamed her for the incarceration of a loved one?’
She sat upright and looked directly at Kate. ‘I’m sure there are people from your past who feel they owe you a violent end.’
The words were shocking, not least because they were said with such certainty. Kate saw Hollis shift in his seat as though unsure whether to intervene but there was no threat here, just a bald statement of fact. The job Kate did left her open to the possibility of retaliation.
‘I’m sure there are,’ she said. ‘But I wouldn’t meet any of them in the early hours of the morning, alone.’
Kerr nodded, conceding the point. It seemed unlikely that Liv would meet somebody she felt might be a threat, especially in a remote place at an early hour.
‘But what if it was somebody who you didn’t know was a threat? Somebody who you might think was a friend? Or somebody pretending a relationship that didn’t exist at all?’
‘Do you have somebody specific in mind?’ Kate asked. Was that where they were being led – to the identity of Liv’s murderer?
Sylvia’s eyes drifted to the fireplace, unfocused. ‘I’m sorry, I have no idea who Liv might have been meeting. It’s a theory based on the suspicions of an old woman.’
‘But…’ Hollis said. Kate frowned at him to keep him quiet but she understood his frustration. Had they been called here for this – for Sylvia Kerr to vent her frustrations about the possible infidelity of her partner? There had to be something more. She’d mentioned the climbing equipment.
‘You said in your text that you’d checked Liv’s climbing equipment? Could we have a look, see what you found?’
‘What’s the point?’ Kerr asked.
‘The point is that you might feel differently about your partner if we can get to the truth about her death. However painful, it will give you certainty rather than those niggling doubts that never go away. I know about infidelity, Sylvia. I know how much it hurts but the not knowing is much worse, much more destructive.’
Hollis’s eyes widened as Kate continued.
‘My ex-husband was a cheat, and not a very good one. In the end my marriage wasn’t worth saving but I think the memory of your relationship with Liv might be. Trust me, the truth is always better than the alternative.’
Sylvia Kerr nodded and got slowly to her feet as if the last few minutes had aged her. ‘You present a compelling case, detective inspector. Follow me.’
She led them back down the hallway and through a door to the right. Passing through an immaculate kitchen with white cupboards
and black marble worktops, Sylvia led them into a huge double garage. The wall opposite the internal door had been fitted with shelves to store tools and other household equipment.
‘Over there.’ She pointed to the corner furthest from the house where ropes and harnesses hung from hooks and shoes were shelved underneath. Carabiners and other metal objects that Kate couldn’t name hung in their own area and two helmets nestled together next to a black fabric chalk bag.
‘You’ve checked everything?’ Kate asked, turning to Sylvia who was leaning against the kitchen door with her arms folded across her chest, elbows resting in opposite palms.
She nodded. ‘Liv was scrupulous about her climbing equipment, obsessive. There’s a list on the bench over there. I checked it and checked every piece of kit.’
She paused and threw her head back as tears filled her eyes. ‘I can tell you with absolute certainty that rope that Liv was hanged with was not one of hers.’
19
O’Connor held the piece of paper up to the fading sunlight coming through the side window of his car and tried to memorise the registration numbers but there were too many and they weren’t in sequence. He was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, with a pen. Cooper hadn’t asked a single question when he’d asked her to find him the index numbers of the small fleet of seven-and-a-half tonne trucks that Sims claimed to own. He knew that it wasn’t because she wasn’t curious, she just didn’t want to be involved if the shit hit the fan with the boss. Fletcher had warned him off spending too much time investigating the haulage company, but she couldn’t complain if he did it in his own time – she’d be seriously pissed off if she knew that he’d involved anybody else though, so he was glad that Cooper knew how to keep her trap shut.
He’d parked on a lane at the back of Houghton’s yard, but he couldn’t see all the vehicles from his car even though they were all parked up against the chain-link fencing. He needed to get out to do a thorough check. There was a night security guard in a tiny shed near the main gate. O’Connor knew this because he’d already spoken to the man, who’d seemed more interested in whatever he was watching on his tablet than in the safety of the yard. He showed little interest in O’Connor’s fake report of a series of vehicle thefts in the area, simply saying he’d ‘keep an eye out’ for anybody who looked dodgy.
Shattered: a gripping crime thriller Page 11
